An ineluctable story of what it takes to roam between the stars.

are we losing out?

I thoroughly enjoy standing next to Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, watching the twin suns set—two sunsets for the price of one, and twice the inspiration for dramatic life decisions. Then I follow him into hyperspace, where we cross hundreds of lightyears in a matter of hours and arrive right on time for the next thrilling backdrop, big revelation, or heroic sprint down a corridor.

From Star Trek and Star Wars to Dark Matter, most space operas take a very creative approach to the universe’s speed limit: the vacuum speed of light. If we insisted on obeying it, the Star Wars saga would unfold over roughly 50,000 years. It would still be epic—just with considerably more waiting, and a much larger role for historians.

what is there to gain?

Space operas that do respect the speed limit are often remarkably rich. Think the Alien franchise, Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, If Fortunate, James S. A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes, or Arthur C. Clarke’s classic Space Odyssey. (Though in the latter two, the protagonists don’t even try to leave the solar system—perhaps wisely saving themselves from a very long commute.)

So where does storytelling take us if we accept this universal truth? What new kinds of adventures appear when distance and time refuse to be hand-waved away? Imagination is the last frontier. “Engage.”

it begins here…

It is the slow speed of light that confines cultures like ours to their home planets. Let’s explore what that really means—and what it would actually take to travel between stars. Who are the true interstellar spacefarers?

Because what begins with simple observations soon leads to profound questions about immortality, identity, and the future of human life on Earth itself.

I hope you’ll follow my blog or podcast, which explores the roots of an ineluctable story—the story of the next step of evolution.

about me

When I was young, I fell head-over-heels for space and time after an encyclopaedia casually informed me that the flow of time is personal. (Which is both profound and a very convenient excuse for being late forever.)

These days I’m a Professor of Theoretical Physics at a university in Western Sydney, Australia. I spend my time hanging out with mathematics and very large computers, trying to coax nature into revealing its hidden beauty. Nature, as it turns out, is a bit shy—so this takes a while.

And then, of course, I have to write all the scientific papers about it. Lots of them. Enough that my second passion—creative writing—often gets bumped to the “sometime after I finish this paragraph” section of my schedule.

Luckily, it didn’t take much to reignite that spark: an extended visit from my niece from Munich, many evenings of wine-fuelled conversations about the glorious impossibilities of sci-fi, and then, because life has a flair for dramatic plotting, a pandemic outbreak, a lockdown… and suddenly there was plenty of time to imagine the impossible.